Bob had left the door open and caused Anna to fall on her keister. Now he wanted her help. God knows, with what, and Anna didn’t much care. Had she been a lesser person, she might have turned and slipped into the night from whence she had come. For the time it took for her heart to beat twice, she considered that perhaps, as an act of humility, she should become a lesser person for one evening.
Switching off the flashlight, she stepped quietly into the Visitors Center. Stale air, marinated in winter, harbored a chill that the outdoors, fierce with life even at forty below, could not attain. Inside cold, like inside dark, was harsher and scarier than anything under the moon.
Instinct – or antipathy – dictated she keep her whereabouts in question. Without moving, without making a sound, she waited for Bob to call again. Thick and slow and glacial, silence flowed around her till she felt if she didn’t move she would suffer the fate of the mastodons, encased in living ice for millennia. Gliding as best she might in the clown-sized boots, she moved from the door to the right, where an open, half-spiral stairway led up to a viewing area.
The main room of the Visitors Center was at least thirty by forty feet. Tall picture windows gave onto a view of Washington Harbor. To the west side of the windows was a skeleton of a mature moose, reassembled and displayed in a glass box. Beside it, trapped in an eternal howl to a mate long dead, was a wolf preserved by the art of taxidermy.
Anna’d seen the displays the first day when she’d looked in the windows. That she could see them now surprised her. Above the level of the trees, the white of the harbor ice and the white of the sky cast a faint silvery light.
“Is anybody there?” Bob’s voice emanated from the offices on the opposite side of the building. He didn’t sound particularly panicked for a man who had been hollering for help moments before. Anna said nothing. Dead, cold air settled more firmly around her.
A minute passed, two: he didn’t call again and didn’t come out. She started across the hardwood floor. Ski-pant legs whistled together, big boots creaked and snuffled.
“Who’s there?” Bob called.
Yeti didn’t sneak, she thought sourly as a beam of yellow light raked down the hall and shot by her.
Anna switched on her light. “Anna Pigeon,” she said, and Bob’s beam blinded her. “Get that damn light out of my eyes. What’s the problem? What are you hollering about?”
The instant he moved his light from her face, she aimed her flashlight at his. His eyes were bright, virtually twinkling, and his skin had a rosy glow. His balaclava was crunched down around his neck, but the hood of his parka was up as if he’d dressed for the cold in a hurry. With those jowls, it couldn’t have been comfortable.
“You look fine to me,” Anna said. A groan and a thump came from down the hall.
“It’s not me; it’s Robin,” Bob said.
Sick fear washed through Anna on a wave of nausea. “Lead me to her,” she said. Bob started to speak, but she cut him off: “Now.” The flashlight beam on his back, she followed him down the short hallway. Years of experience and training told her she should have listened to what he had to say, but Bob managed to tap directly into a deep vein of irritation.
“What happened?” she meant to ask, but it was a demand.
“Robin’s been pretty upset since Katherine’s accident,” Bob replied, his voice warm with concern.
“And?”
At the end of the hallway, he turned right. Anna quickened her steps; she didn’t want him out of her sight. He stopped in the last doorway, the corner office with a view of the lake. A plastic name-plate, printed with DISTRICT RANGER, was in a faux-brass holder to the right of the doorframe.
Blocking the entrance with his bulk, big on a bad day, bigger still with the down coat, he said: “Not everybody can handle violence with your aplomb, Anna.” He used his nice-fellow voice, but the intent to insult was clear. Anna was not insulted. With guys like Menechinn in the world, she was liking the idea of violence better and better.
“Robin,” she called. A retching sound trickled on a moan from the dark room.
“Step away from the door,” Anna said.
“She’s been drinking pretty heavily,” Bob said. “I think she started sneaking it not too long after you left for your ski outing.”
“Move away from the door.”
“Aren’t we the officious little woman,” he said, but he moved.
The office reeked of wine. Robin was on the floor, her long legs curled up, knees under her chin. She was hatless and her hair fanned out around her head. Damp strands stuck to her face.
Half her attention on the young woman, half on Bob’s hulking shadow, glimpsed in stripes and washes as the beams of their lights moved, Anna knelt. “Robin, it’s Anna. Can you talk to me?” she asked gently as she pried open one eyelid, then the other, and shined her light in. Both pupils reacted sluggishly. Dilation could have been caused by drugs or darkness. Robin’s skin was cool to the touch and diaphoretic. Any number of things could account for that.
“I went out for a walk,” Bob said. “When I came by the V.C., I heard noises and came up to see what was going on. I found her back here with a box of the wine she’d taken from the bathroom fridge.” He played his light to the box of merlot on the floor a few feet from Robin. A mason jar was tipped over next to it, a stain spreading on the carpet. “I was trying to get her up and take her back to the bunkhouse, so she wouldn’t freeze to death, when I heard you come in.”
Anna flicked her light to his face. He threw up an arm as if the beam was a blow. With the cut of shadow, she couldn’t read his expression.
“Yeah, well, here’s your chance.”
Between the two of them, they got Robin to her feet and out of the Visitors Center. The trail from the bunkhouse to the V.C. and dock was swampy in summer. A wooden walkway, two planks wide, had been built to keep foot traffic from tearing up the muddy ground. Snow hid the planks, rendering the path tricky in much the same way the downed trees made traversing the cedar swamps tricky.
“Better let me carry her,” Bob said. “You walk ahead with the light.”
Anna hated that idea. Hated the idea of Bob doing a good deed, hated the idea of Bob touching Robin, hated the idea of being helped and hated the idea that she didn’t have the strength to carry the girl herself.
“Thanks,” she said, wondering what it was about Bob – or about having one’s life saved – that was so irritating. “Watch your footing.”
Bob picked Robin up easily. The biotech was tall, but slender as a blade of grass. “Go on ahead. I can light your way better from behind,” Anna told him. This was marginally true; with an effort, she could shine the lights around him.
As she followed in his tracks, the size of the man, the unconscious woman in his arms, the flickering of the two flashlights, brought to mind a dozen derivatives of King Kong and Frankenstein; the beast, lumbering from the torchlight, the damsel clutched to his chest.
Anna opened the door to the bunkhouse and Bob shouldered in with his burden. At the computer on the rear wall of the common room, Adam glanced over his shoulder. Then he was on his feet. Anna didn’t see him gather himself and stand – one moment, he was sitting; the next, standing.
Jonah stood as well. “Ridley,” he called without taking his eyes off them. “Get in here.”
Bob didn’t put Robin down on the couch or move toward her room but stopped a moment to savor the spotlight. “Drunk as a frat boy on Friday night,” he said.
“Robin’s drunk. Passed out. Drunk,” Adam said tonelessly, his face gone the color of ashes, his hands knotted in fists at his sides, knuckles hard-boned and sharp.
“Yep,” Bob said. “I guess this wog business was getting to her. I, for one, will be glad when the Forest Service gets us off this island. Sooner is better.”
To Anna’s amazement, the permafrost that had replaced Adam’s skin melted and his fists uncurled. “I’m glad you were looking after her, Bob. She’s a good kid.” Adam reached to take the unconscious girl. His arms were as stiff as a Hollywood mummy’s.
Bob wasn’t about to have his prize snatched away. Anna stepped in before they started fighting over Robin like dogs over a bone.
“Jonah,” she said as she pried Robin from Bob’s embrace and draped one of the girl’s arms across her shoulders. “Would you mind making a pot of coffee?”
“I’m on it,” he said.
Supporting the younger woman, Anna began their stumbling way to the bedroom. Bob and Adam followed. She stopped, braced Robin against her hip, turned and held them with her gaze for a moment.
“When the coffee’s done, ask Jonah to bring it to me.”
They didn’t recognize the dismissal.
Anna made it clearer. “Go away.”
Having no idea how much Robin had consumed, what her tolerance was or if she was on any other drugs or medications, Anna had no intention of letting her sleep until some of the effects wore off. At a guess, besides the wine she had taken a barbiturate of some kind. Tranquilizers or sleeping pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet secreted away for emergency meltdowns. If her system was too depressed, sleeping could push her from unconscious to dead. Coffee, poking, prodding and making witty conversation were all Anna had in the way of antidotes.
She settled Robin on her bed, back against the wall, legs out straight. Like a Raggedy Ann, Robin’s head cocked to one side and her arms limp, palms up. Twice she blinked, then her eyes opened preternaturally wide. The beneficent image of Raggedy Ann was replaced by that of Chucky. The illusion lasted long enough for Anna’s adrenaline to spike one more time.
“You’re in our room. You are safe,” Anna told her. “Whatever demons are chasing you will have to come through me. Can you tell me how much you had to drink?”
Robin didn’t answer. Her eyes drifted closed and she mumbled, “Demons.”
“No demons,” Anna said with obnoxious good cheer, her voice pitched sharply enough to penetrate the biotech’s fog but not to carry beyond the closed door. “How much did you drink?”
“Drink,” Robin parroted. “Ish.” Fingers numb with whatever was in her system, she began fumbling at the hem of her sweater, unable to clutch it hard enough to lift the wool over her head. “I’m wet.”
“You have wine spilled on you. That sweater is soaked in it. You smell like a wet dog,” Anna told her. “A wet, alcoholic dog.” She moved to help Robin off with her sweater and she batted at Anna.
“No. No. No.” Each was a single, pitiful cry, as if against an inevitable and familiar evil she was helpless to stop. Anna sat back down. Women who had been raped or sexually abused, either as adults or as children, occasionally exhibited a fear of having their clothes removed by anyone else, even an EMT or physician. Most overcame the instantaneous terror, at least enough to hide it when they were sober. Drunk or drugged or distraught, it often resurfaced.
“You’re okay,” Anna said. “When you want help with your clothes, you tell me. Till then, I’m going to sit right here and make sure nobody bothers you.”
“How’s our girl?”
Fucking Bob. “Go away.”
With a jolt of guilt, Anna remembered Katherine had told her to keep Robin away from him. At the time, she’d written it off as the hissing of a jealous woman. Now she heard it as a warning. Bob had been eyeing Robin since he’d hit the island. Would he be evil enough to rape a young woman, mentally unstable from shock, who had gotten drunk?
Not raped, Anna thought. Had rape occurred signs would have been evident. A wave of relief, startling in its intensity, buoyed her up. Robin was, in some indefinable way, the essence of innocence. Not the coy, shy innocence the Victorians peddled but the fearless innocence of young wild things.
Robin’s hands, palms up to either side of her thighs on the mattress ticking, twitched like cats’ paws do when they dream. They stilled, and Anna saw not Robin but Katherine, the stumps of her gnawed fingers, the torn mess of her palms.
Anna had walked in on Bob, in the dark, on his hands and knees, over the corpse. Katherine’s parka was unzipped. The thought Bob had been sexually involved with the body had crossed Anna’s mind in a stampede of cloven hooves.
Katherine dead, Robin dead drunk. There were men who liked women to be objectified in this ultimate way.
Anna shook her head the way a dog with a sore ear will shake trying to rid itself of a pain it cannot stop or touch. America had changed radically from when she was a girl. Women – girls – had gone from the underrepresented in numbers and inferior in ratings to the majority and the best rated in a huge number of areas: college, graduate school, medicine, law. A woman had been Secretary of State, a woman Speaker of the House, a presidential candidate. Women were mayors, governors and university deans. No longer was it said that girls weren’t as smart as boys; now the focus was on how the system had failed the nation’s sons.
That’s what had changed.
Rape was what hadn’t changed.
Women were in the military and they were raped by their fellow soldiers. Girls were in college and they were raped by their fellow students. Rape crisis centers had sprung up and rape counselors. Yet it was still ignored in the most essential way: people in power didn’t want to touch it lest they get their hands dirty.
This was true in the armed forces, corporate America, universities. And in the National Park Service. A friend of Anna’s had been raped; she’d been working seasonally as a fire technician. She’d been struck down and raped by an NPS employee, a permanent, someone close to the Assistant Superintendent. Anna and the woman’s parents convinced her to report it.
The rape was never turned over to law enforcement. Higher-ups in the park talked to the victim, offered to set up “mediations” between her and her rapist that they might learn to work and play well together. The rapist was not fired. The crime was treated as a spat between roommates rather than as a felony assault. NPS employees raping seasonals wouldn’t be good PR.
And maybe she was lying. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she had it coming.
That was the unsaid, the way otherwise-decent men and women could refuse to help and still think themselves good people.
“Arthritis.”
Still limp as a rag doll, Robin was staring at Anna. “Arthritis,” she said in an eerie monotone a thread above a whisper.
Anna’d been cracking her knuckles and clenching her jaw.
“Thanks.” She shook out her hands and let them hang loosely between her knees. Bone and muscle ached. “Drink some coffee.”
Anna helped with holding the cup and raising it to Robin’s lips. “Not bad,” she said when only a tablespoon or two slopped on the ruined sweater.
“My mom made this,” Robin said.
The sweater was a classic pattern, deep chocolate with a band of white reindeer marching single file across the chest and the back. “It’s beautiful,” Anna said. It had been, before the wine stained the reindeer the creepy color of cheap stage blood.
Robin bent at the waist to take off her knee-high mukluks and fell over sideways on the bed. Anna made no move to help her till the young woman asked for assistance. Having set her back up in her Raggedy Ann pose, Anna unlaced the soft boots and worked them off.
“There.” Robin pointed at her sock-clad feet.
“What?” Anna didn’t see any damage. The socks weren’t wet and the skin beneath radiated body heat.
“Mom knitted my socks for my feet. They fit better than any other socks.”
“Wow,” was all Anna could say. “Beats baking cookies all to hell.”
“All to hell.”
Anna helped her to another sip of coffee, then took a drink herself. The long day was beginning to wear on her.
A tap at the door was followed by the pilot’s grizzled face. “More coffee?”
“Food?” Anna asked.
“Coming up.” The door snicked shut.
Another tap quickly followed. “Robin?”
Bob.
“Go away.”
Jonah brought them each a bowl of beef-and-pasta casserole and more coffee. The food fortified Anna, and the few bites she could be induced to take seemed to help Robin some. Finally she asked Anna to help her remove the wine-soaked sweater.
As the fire was banked and others went to bed, the bunkhouse stilled and cooled. At ten, the lights went out; Jonah had shut down the generator for the night. Had Anna been sure Robin was loaded on booze, and only booze, she would have let her sleep it off and been grateful to do so. As it was, she lit a candle and propped herself next to the biotech where she could nudge her awake for at least another hour or two till her system wasn’t so depressed.
To keep them both from falling asleep, Anna began asking questions. In the next ninety minutes, she learned that Jonah was seventy-three years old, Ridley’s wife was probably a bona fide genius, Gavin, Robin’s sweetheart, loved Proust and classical guitar and the early works of Andrew Wyeth, had wonderful hands and thought Isle Royale was America’s last chance at saving Eden, that Adam had been married but his wife had committed suicide, slit her wrists and bled to death in the bath while he fixed the sink in the dressing room not ten feet away, and that Rolf Peterson had great legs.
By eleven-thirty, the candle was burned to a stub, and Robin was waxing fairly coherent. Anna watched her get undressed and slip into her sleeping bag. Her clothes didn’t look as if they’d been messed with and there was no bruising visible on arms, back or thighs. Reassured, Anna blew out the candle.
Before she crawled into her own sleeping bag, she turned the lock on the bedroom door. Without the heat from the stove, the room would be cold, but at least she would know no one was watching them as they slept.